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aspiring and drooping plants, as well as the contrast of colours.
I have also endeavoured to delineate, but found it impossible
to do justice to the rainbow, either in its vivid hues or its trans-
parent effect. I should have wished to give an adequate idea
of that harmonious contest which I witnessed betwixt the vivid
meteor in the sky, and tile assemblage of objects seeming to vie
with the rainbow     in the richness of their colours.
The next contrast i shall mention is that of Light and Dark,
not in shadow     and shade, but of a variety in colouring observ-
able in Nature, and well worth cultivating in the art of Garden-
ing, although difficult to represent in painting. Of this I shall
enumerate several kinds.
First, The difference of a leaf with the light shining full
upon it, which renders it an opake object, and the same leaf
seen transparent by the light shining through it.*
Secondly, The Contrast produced amidst the more gaudy
Colouring by the sort of repose that the eye derives, sometimes
from white flowers, as of the jasmine, the passion-flower, and
other plants, whose leaves are dark and not glossy: sometimes
variety in our gardens: while in others I have collected together all the diflerent spe-
cies of some beautiful genus: thus in the Thomery at Woburn are to be found every
species of thorns which will bear the climate.
* Having one day, when at Holwood, pointed this out to Mr. Pitt as a source of
the delight we experience in a sunny day, from an open trellis of vines overhead, or the
foliage in the roof of a conservatory, he was so forcibly struck with the remark, that
he made several experiments with leaves of different shapes and tints, some of which,
from the opaker ramification of their fibres, or other circumstances of texture, &c. be.
came new objects of delight to a mind like his, capable of resorting to the beauties of
Nature, as a relief from the severer duties of his arduous situation.